IT’S THE MOST MIND-BLOWING MOMENT IN THE BACK TO THE FUTURE TRILOGY! More disturbing than Marty McFly discovering his father’s grave; more disorienting than Lorraine McFly (nee Baines) putting the moves on her son; more startling than Biff Tannen face-planting into a truckload of manure! Grown men have wept, ladies have screamed, studio execs have consulted their therapists. And now it’s YOUR turn! Are you ready for the ultimate, shattering, cinematic experience? Can your heart stand the shocking truth when you see…
Doc Brown dance with a woman?
(Cue lightning flashes, thunderclaps, banshee shrieks…)
Okay, I may be overstating things a bit. It’s just that in rewatching Back to the Future Part III (1990), I was surprised to find myself moved by the sight of Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) extending a hand to newly arrived schoolmarm Clara Clayton (Mary Steenburgen), and escorting her out onto the town dance floor of Hill Valley, 1885 for a courtly spin. There’s such an innocence to the moment, and such joy on Doc’s face, that it stands in stark contrast to the rest of the franchise. To this point, the BTTF series was better known for its science fiction gimcrackery and its gleefully rude humor. But with that sweet, charming gesture, the Doc and Clara ushered the franchise into a region it had heretofore hesitated exploring: Actual human emotion.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised. After all, the previous chapter, Back to the Future Part II (1989) played more as a conceptual experiment than a straight-on narrative, positing a dark, alternate 1985 in its second act, then in its third act pulling a sort of “Trials and Tribble-ations” by having Doc Brown and Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) weaving in and out of the finale of the original Back to the Future (1985). There was a logic to the way that film was structured: It came during a time when the industry was hewing to a philosophy George Lucas advanced for the original Star Wars trilogy, that a first sequel could function as a kind of second-act to a three-act play. It could be darker and unresolved, with the expectation that all would be neatly wrapped up in the third and final installment.
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In that light, it’s not hard to imagine that writer/director Robert Zemeckis and his co-writer Bob Gale decided that Part II would be their laboratory to tinker around with time paradoxes and with the nature of narrative filmmaking itself. Possibly they intended to exhaust all of their conceptual fancies in one go, so that when they got around to the third and final chapter—which was actually shot back-to-back with Part II—they could kick back and tell a more traditional story.
Which is what they did. At the very end of Part II, a bolt of lightning strikes and vaporizes the DeLorean time machine, with Doc aboard. But all is not lost: In one more bit of conceptual brilliance, as soon as the machine vanishes, a Western Union courier (Joe Flaherty) arrives. Turns out his office has been holding onto a seven-decades-old letter, with instructions to deliver the missive to the specific date, time, and place that Marty would witness Doc’s disappearance. Within that letter comes reassuring tidings: The lightning bolt that struck the car actually activated the flux capacitor, zapping Doc back to the Hill Valley of the nineteenth century. He’s been living happily there for eight months, and has hidden away the time machine so that it could safely sit out the next seventy years without discovery. It falls to Marty to have 1955 Doc Brown retrieve it, repair it, and get the teen back to his own time.
There’s just one fly in the buttermilk: While fetching the DeLorean, Doc and Marty stumble upon Doc’s gravestone, discovering he was murdered by Biff Tannen’s ancestor Buford (Tom Wilson), one week after the Doc had commissioned that much-delayed mail delivery. Change of plans: Marty resolves to travel back to Hill Valley 1885 in order to rescue the Doc and bring the scientist and himself Back to the Future. The 1985 future. Not the 1955 future, which is also the future from the perspective of 1885. But that’s not the future Marty wants to go back to… the future… of 1985, to which he wants to go back… Sorry, I’m getting a little lost here…
And here’s the point where I have to admit that this isn’t the only place I’m lost with Part III. Y’see, the whole idea behind The SF Path to Higher Consciousness is to look at how filmmakers have used science fiction concepts to explore humanity and its place in the universe. But once Marty zaps himself back to the scrubby little mining town of Hill Valley, the science fiction aspect is pretty much over. Oh, there are the fun, anachronistic gags—Marty and Doc know stuff and make references that people of that time shouldn’t—and there’s the well-established BTTF trope of the pair referring to a photograph of Doc’s tombstone to determine how their actions are affecting their fates, but that stuff feels tangential to the story being told. And yes, there is the fantastic action finale in which the DeLorean time machine gets propelled by an out-of-control steam engine in order to reach the requisite 88 mph that will trigger the flux capacitor, all at the risk of Doc’s and Clara’s lives. But the time-travel goal is more McGuffin than integral to the film’s themes—they may as well be racing to the mill to rescue Nell Fenwick from the buzzsaw to which Snidely Whiplash has her tied.
What it feels like, truth be told, is that Zemeckis wanted to revivify a genre that had fallen into disrepair in the preceding decades—the Western—and decided to use the device of time travel get there. The director loves the genre, clearly—it’s obvious in the myriad references scattered throughout the film, from the first overview of the town of Hill Valley that echoes a similar sequence in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), to that town dance sequence and the use of Arizona’s Monument Valley that contain resonances of John Ford’s magnificent My Darling Clementine (1946).
So okay, maybe a primary goal was to dip a toe into a long-beloved but more-recently neglected genre. But in doing so, it seems that Zemeckis also did something significant for his own career. And the locus for that change was in the complete character one-eighty that Doc Brown undergoes.
Through the whole of the franchise, up to this point, the Doc has been perfect evocation of the reclusive eccentric: A man devoted to his (not-so) crackpot creations to the exclusion of all else, including human relations. Even with his closest friend, Marty McFly, the Doc expresses his bond through invention—that monster amp at the very start of BTTF, for example. He’s a scientist first and foremost, something he insists to Marty when the teen speculates that Clara is Doc’s girlfriend. His commitment to his calling is all, and he is resolute in that stance.
Or so he thinks. That declaration of scientific purity comes within the context of a time and a place where the support structure for Doc’s passions is not quite as robust as it would be in 1985—or 1955, for that matter. Telegraph and photography are still new-fangled innovations, and the town is in a state-of-becoming that makes the activation of a clock for the yet-to-be-finished courthouse—yes, that clock—cause for celebration. The Doc may want to push the envelope, but he is living in a time when horse-power is literal, warm baths a luxury. Being closer to the natural over the technological is bound to have an impact on even the most avid of technophiles, and the Doc isn’t immune to that influence. Add in the arrival of Clara, a woman of the mind who has no trouble matching Doc intellect for intellect, and the man suddenly finds himself tapping an emotional aspect he had previously eschewed.
And here’s where I wonder whether Zemeckis, by reconnecting Doc to his humanity, may have been reconnecting himself as well. The director had spent the entire previous film toying with paradoxes and anachronisms, exploring ways in which the cutting-edge of filmmaking technology could weave an intricate, narrative-bending tale. But by invoking the classic Western in Part III, he may well have discovered what the likes of John Ford and Sergio Leone, absent access to computer-driven filmmaking advances, knew all along: The tech could be swell, but what really mattered was stuff like settings, and stories, and, above all else, characters. (And let’s just note that Ford and Leone—and such compatriots as Howard Hawks—weren’t just putting the stereotypical “Matinee Cowboy” up on the screen. Their characters had nuances, dark sides, frailties. It’s why their films remain classics to this day.) By accident or design, in the act of casting the Doc back to the realm of a hallowed but dormant genre, Zemeckis also broke Emmett Brown out of his caricature, and rendered him a more fully dimensional person.
…And possibly also woke a successful director up to an aspect of film storytelling that he maybe wasn’t aware he had been missing. I don’t think it’s too much of stretch to think that if Zemeckis saw any BTTF character as his surrogate, it would be Doc Brown. The whimsical mien, the adherence to the notion that there was no problem that technology could not solve—it all seems of a piece with a director well-known for telling tales through cutting-edge filmmaking. But if the Doc’s eyes are opened in the act of bonding with a kindred spirit over a telescope, so does Zemeckis seem to come to realize his facilities as a director extend beyond choreographing the gyrations of motion-control cameras. For all the fun and excitement that he invests into Part III’s action sequences, he also brings true heart to Doc’s courtship of Clara. Lloyd breaks through his patented oddball kookiness to deliver a truly touching performance, and Steenburgen meets him in kind, with humor and empathy. They make a beguiling, delightful couple. This, as much as anything, is what allowed Part III to escape the curse of many second sequels: By being not a warning sign of a franchise running out of (period-appropriate) steam, but a tale with a true feelings.
Maybe it helped point Zemeckis in the direction he had always needed to go. He’d have one more, blowout tech-spree—the misanthropic, humans-as-cartoon-characters Death Becomes Her (1992)—but then would alter course, applying his technological chops to the very human (albeit, IMHO, problematic) Forrest Gump (1994). He would never stray far from his compulsion to innovate storytelling through tech, for better or worse (insert your own “for worse” example here). But when ganged to his ability to tell compelling, emotional stories—think Flight (2012) or The Walk (2015)—he demonstrated that, like a certain crackpot inventor who discovers his capacity to love, one could imbue the machine with a true heart.
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Wow. I started this series with the intent of discovering the distinct messages to be found in a trilogy notable for not telling the same story three times, and wound up exploring a director’s odyssey to the next phase of his career. A lot of it is pure conjecture, of course—once again, Zemeckis deferred engagement when I reached out—but I still think it’s a valid interpretation. What do you think? Am I way off base, here? Were there signs of Zemeckis moving in a more humanistic direction even before BTTF, or are there other directors who have done a better job of melding tech and soul in their works? The floor is yours in the comments section below. Keep it polite, keep it friendly—remember: our society has grown beyond showdowns at high noon!
Dan Persons has been knocking about the genre media beat for, oh, a good handful of years, now. He’s presently house critic for the radio show Hour of the Wolf on WBAI 99.5FM in New York, and previously was editor of Cinefantastique and Animefantastique, as well as producer of news updates for The Monster Channel. He is also founder of Anime Philadelphia, a program to encourage theatrical screenings of Japanese animation. And you should taste his One Alarm Chili! Wow!
